It is important to make IT greener, but we need a better watchdog than Greenpeace, says Peter Judge

Greenpeace is a diverse organisation that campaigns across a wide range of issues. It’s recently been weighing in on IT issues, which I initially thought was a good idea. Instead, its actions have undermined my confidence in the whole organisation.

The basic idea of holding organisations to account is good. But it needs to be fair, and Greenpeace seems to be out of its depth, applying standards inconsistently, protesting in the wrong places, and sometimes just missing the point.

Even when Greenpeace staged its protest, Apple was already running a pretty green ship. It had plans for the largest array of solar cells in the US, and a big set of fuel cells from Bloom Energy.

It was already greener than most of its rivals. On Thursday it announced it would double the solar power used in its data centre, and get all the remaining power from local renewable sources.

Now, that announcement didn’t happen overnight, so it is clear that Greenpeace was picketing a company that was already doing the right thing, and about to go one better.When Apple made its announcement, Greenpeace looked stupid – or, if you are extremely credulous, looked as if it had changed Apple.

Greenpeace maintains that it had no idea Apple’s announcement was coming, and says “in fact, we still think Apple has much more that they can achieve”.

And in a previous guide (to Greener Electronics, not the cloud) Greenpeace has slated Apple for having no policies on things like the removal of pollutants like BFRs, lead and PVC from its kit, while marking up firms that have a plan to stop using those chemicals.

But, as it turned out, Apple had no policy for removing those chemicals, because it has already removed them.

It is important that cloud services are implemented efficiently as they are going to account for and increasing amount of our energy use. But there are already forces in place (economics and regulations) to push companies in the right direction, and groups like the Green Grid and Facebook’s Open Compute sharing knowledge.

I could see a role for an outside organisation keeping watch on whether companies are keeping up to the mark.